The Walthamstow Anarchist Group committed an act of guerrilla politics the other week: cleaning up a local war memorial, to demonstrate the hypocrisy of politicians who send us off to war, paying lip service to the war dead, but don't really care about honouring their memory. I don't agree with the WAG's actual argument, but I really liked this action.

Kind of a common thread to do with shifting alliances and antagonisms over gay rights and homophobia, Islamofascism and Islamophobia (or, rather, 'Islamofascism' and 'Islamophobia'), and the Galloway/Tatchell battle:

By the way, I've been messing around with the stuff over to the right---> What do you reckon?

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(Added Monday:) An update on Reality Cafe's google-bombing project: there is some success to report. The saviour of Pakistan is the first hit for the words "insensitive jerk" on Yahoo, Dogpile, Vivisimo, Alltheweb & Metacrawler, and number 4 on MSN. The bad news: 1) nowhere near the top at google. 2) the President's website now has earthquake relief in Pakistan as its title, which makes the google-bombers seem like the insensitive jerks now...

This is a preliminary response to Raven’s request (repeated here and here) for an itemised account of what’s wrong with Noam Chomsky. I think that, for me, there are five things I find distasteful about Chomsky.

TM: Are you a fan of any particular kind of music, and can we play a request for you? NC: If I told you what my tastes where, it would shock you.TM: Oh no, you go right ahead. Shock me.NC: Almost nothing. I am very much restricted to things in my childhood or before. Far before.TM: Our CD catalog is pretty large, try me.NC: I wouldn't even know what to say. Beethovens Late Quartets.TM: Anything in R&B or pop music. Anything that rings a bell?NC: I am so ignorant, it isn't even worth asking me. I sort of knew something when my kids were around, but that's a lot of years ago.

“Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.”[ref]

Sport is “a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements -- in fact, it's training in irrational jingoism. That's also a feature of competitive sports. I think if you look closely at these things, I think, typically, they do have functions, and that's why energy is devoted to supporting them and creating a basis for them and advertisers are willing to pay for them and so on.”[ref]

These two prejudices of Chomsky reveal his fundamentally elitist worldview, his distaste for the messy reality of ordinary human beings. You never read human stories in his books. People are just pawns manipulated by the great powers, sponges uncritically absorbing the lies told to them by Fox News, nameless innocentmenwomenandchildren to be mowed down by the evil empire and stacked up anonymously in a bodycount to be compared dispassionately to some other bodycount.

I do not believe in the notion that the scholar should be impartial, neutral, disengaged, objective. The model of the scholar as white-coated scientist, standing above the hurly-burly of politics, is an illusion. I therefore have no problem with Chomsky using his academic status in order to gain the platform to act politically. In fact, like C Wright Mills or Hannah Arendt, I see political engagement as a far higher value than academic scholarship.

My problem is the way that Chomsky exploits the myth of academic objectivity and expertise. Through his mastery of the codes of academic speech, he has perfected the art of giving his pronouncements a veneer of ‘facticity’. He never uses the first person; he peppers his work with quotations, references and footnotes; he liberally sprinkles his work with numbers and statistics and factoids. This is an elitist rhetorical strategy, designed to bolster his authority as an author. We can call it scholasticism, rather than scholarship.

For those on his side who are unable to think for themselves, he appears to have done the thinking for them. For those who disagree with him, they find themselves up against a sheer glass cliff of fact and argument, impossible to challenge. When someone – like Oliver Kamm – takes the trouble to look up the references, though, or decipher the stats, they often turn out to be far shakier than Chomsky lets on.

Chomsky’s performance of scholarship and his coldness are, I believe, related on a deep level. His disregard for humans in favour of an abstract humanity fits well with his scholastic cultivation of dispassionate, fact- and number-heavy prose in his books.

3. Ultra-liberalism

Chomsky’s linguistic theory, which stresses innate human capacity to acquire language, sits squarely in an Enlightenment rationalist tradition that goes back to Descartes, which stresses the individual's rational capacities, tied to a theory of the innateness of knowledge. This philosophical tradition has flowed into classical liberal political theory, as exemplified in Voltaire’s thought and in the some of the documents of America’s Founders. One of the key elements in this rationalist liberal Enlightenment worldview is the doctrine of Free Speech.

For Free Speech fundamentalists, the right to speak freely is the highest of values. For some critics of Free Speech fundamentalism, free speech is one among many rights, and must be balanced against them, but also against our responsibilities as citizens. Thus Chomsky has fallen foul of anti-fascists and anti-racists who see the right to free speech as balanced against the right to live free of racist or fascist violence. Anti-fascists see Chomsky’s defence of genocide-deniers’ “right” to speak as placing freedom of speech above the lives of those who have died in the genocides denied – and the lives at risk from future acts of violence which denial makes more possible.

(Other critics of Free Speech fundamentalism stress instead the contingency of rights and the social construction of the ways we speak. Thus Chomsky and Foucault’s antagonism to each other. But that’s a different story.)

The liberal free speech doctrine complements Chomsky’s rationalist conception of the role of the intellectual – himself – as exemplar of humanity’s rational capacities. And again, Chomsky’s ultra-liberalism fits well with his moral coldness. To place an abstract morality of free speech above the suffering of real people, which is the essence of Free Speech fundamentalism, is pretty cold.

4. Manicheanism

Increasingly in Chomsky’s writings, we find a manichean worldview – an evil ‘West’ against the innocent rest. ‘The West’, America, Zionism and capitalism have, over time, come to be more or less equivalent terms in Chomsky’s vocabulary. Anything evil you can name, Chomsky will either somehow trace it back to ‘The West’, or else compare it to the crimes of ‘The West’ and find it somehow less evil: “Yes, but we armed him.” “Yes, but that’s not as bad as that massacre we committed.” “Yes, but the real terrorist is America.” “Yes, but this is the chickens coming home to roost.”

This manicheanism means Chomsky is willing to use the language of moral judgment about actions by ‘the West’, but not about actions by the rest. His books talk about the My Lai massacre and “huge terror operations” perpetrated by America in Vietnam, but not about ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. At times, this can amount to pursuing double standards. At worst, it relativises, contextualises away, apologises for and excuses some of the most evil acts our time has seen. It is in this frame that we have to view his minimising away of Pol Pot’s genocide, of Osama’s attacks on New York, of the Serbian violence against Bosnians – and his defence of those who minimise genocide even more radically than he ever does, such as Faurisson or LM.

Once again, we can see this worldview as fundamentally disrespectful to human life, in the name of an abstract humanity. Those killed at Kishinev become a mere footnote – “only 49”; those who died in the Twin Towers become mere collateral damage.

5. Slippage from vulgar materialism to conspiracy theory

The fifth problem I have with Chomsky is the ontology that underlies his work. This used to be a version of what Marxists call “vulgar materialism”: the crude determinism that traces all human events back to economic causes. (The most prevalent version of vulgar materialism these days is the idiotic “blood for oil” psuedo-analysis of the Iraq wars.) This vulgar materialism has animated Chomsky’s truly impressive analyses of the political economy of the mass media and of the political economy of modern warfare. Increasingly, though, this vulgar materialism seems to give way in Chomsky’s writing to the vulgar materialism of fools: conspiracy theory.

When Chomsky portrays a gullible citizenry manipulated by a sophisticated web (I don’t think he’s actually ever used the word “cabal”) of shadowy financiers, media moguls and military strategists, he is sustaining a view of the world based on conspiracy theory. Hence the enthusiastic take-up of his work by people who think 9/11 didn’t happen or was a Mossad plot, the people who think Srebrenica or the massacre of Kosovan Albanians was fabricated, the people who see the Project for a New American Century as the latter-day Elders of Zion.

Again, this vulgar materialist/conspiracy theory mentality reflects his utter lack of respect for ordinary people, who are reduced to pawns in the power games of the mighty.

6. Chomsky as brand

Finally, in addition to these five issues, I am suspicious of Chomsky for the way he has become a star, a brand even. Chomskyites like to think of their guru as an archetype of “dissent”, as voicing something repressed from the “mainstream” media. Yet look in any bookstore, pick up any broadsheet, you will find it remarkably easy to access Chomsky’s views. Chomsky, like Michael Moore, is a hot commodity, and the ease with which capital commodifies and recuperates them for the market makes me suspicious. But that is not a fair criticism, as it is not a criticism of Chomsky, but rather of what is done with Chomsky – it is a problem not of Chomsky but of the culture of celebrity and branding and bullshit in which Chomsky seems to sit so easily.

I have added Little Apples to the links list on the right. I'm trying to operate a one in/one out policy on the links list, so it doesn't get too long, so I've removed Dash05, so this is your opportunity to visit them.

You may have read Emma Brockes' interview with Noam Chomsky after he perversely won the Prospect intellectual of the year award, or whatever it was called. Brockes rightly called Chomsky on some of his more dubious political position, particularly his apologism for deniers and downgraders of the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.

In case Chomsky takes it down, I'm putting the crucial bits here. Bear in mind that this is only part of the profile, which was largely, I thought, quite affectionate. Also, the hyperlinks are added.

These days, Carol accompanies her husband to most of his public appearances. He is asked to lend his name to all sorts of crackpot causes and she tries to intervene to keep his schedule under control. As some see it, one ill-judged choice of cause was the accusation made by Living Marxism magazine that during the Bosnian war, shots used by ITN of a Serb-run detention camp were faked. The magazine folded after ITN sued, but the controversy flared up again in 2003 when a journalist called Diane Johnstone made similar allegations in a Swedish magazine, Ordfront, taking issue with the official number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre. (She said they were exaggerated.) In the ensuing outcry, Chomsky lent his name to a letter praising Johnstone's "outstanding work". Does he regret signing it?"No," he says indignantly. "It is outstanding. My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough. It may be wrong; but it is very careful and outstanding work."How, I wonder, can journalism be wrong and still outstanding?"Look," says Chomsky, "there was a hysterical fanaticism about Bosnia in western culture which was very much like a passionate religious conviction. It was like old-fashioned Stalinism: if you depart a couple of millimetres from the party line, you're a traitor, you're destroyed. It's totally irrational. And Diane Johnstone, whether you like it or not, has done serious, honest work. And in the case of Living Marxism, for a big corporation to put a small newspaper out of business because they thinksomething they reported was false, is outrageous."They didn't "think" it was false; it was proven to be so in a court of law. But Chomsky insists that "LM was probably correct" and that, in any case, it is irrelevant. "It had nothing to do with whether LM or Diane Johnstone were right or wrong." It is a question, he says, of freedom of speech. "And if they were wrong, sure; but don't just scream well, if you say you're in favour of that you're in favour of putting Jews in gas chambers."Eh? Not everyone who disagrees with him is a "fanatic", I say. These are serious, trustworthy people."Like who?""Like my colleague, Ed Vulliamy."Vulliamy's reporting for the Guardian from the war in Bosnia won him the international reporter of the year award in 1993 and 1994. He was present when the ITN footage of the Bosnian Serb concentration camp was filmed and supported their case against LM magazine."Ed Vulliamy is a very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true."But Karadic's number two herself [Biljana Plavsic] pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity."Well, she certainly did. But if you want critical work on the party line, General Lewis MacKenzie who was the Canadian general in charge, has written that most of the stories were complete nonsense."And so it goes on, Chomsky fairly vibrating with anger at Vulliamy and co's "tantrums" over his questioning of their account of the war. I suggest that if they are having tantrums it's because they have contact with the survivors of Srebrenica and witness the impact of the downplaying of their experiences. He fairly explodes. "That's such a western European position. We are used to having our jackboot on people's necks, so we don't see our victims. I've seen them: go to Laos, go to Haiti, go to El Salvador. You'll see people who are really suffering brutally. This does not give us the right to lie about that suffering." Which is, I imagine, why ITN went to court in the first place.You could pick any number of other conflicts over which to have a barney with Chomsky. Seeing as we have entered the bad-tempered part of the interview, I figure we may as well continue and ask if he finds it ironic that, given his views on the capitalist system, he is a beneficiary of it. "Well, what capitalist system? Do you use a computer? Do you use the internet? Do you take an aeroplane? That comes from the state sector of the economy. I'm certainly a beneficiary of this state-based, quasi-market system; does that mean that I shouldn't try to make it a better society?"OK, let's look at the non-state based, quasi-market system. Does he have a share portfolio? He looks cross. "You'd have to ask my wife about that. I'm sure she does. I don't see any reason why she shouldn't. Would it help people if I went to Montana and lived on a mountain? It's only rich, privileged westerners - who are well educated and therefore deeply irrational - in whose minds this idea could ever arise. When I visit peasants in southern Colombia, they don't ask me these questions."I suggest that people don't like being told off about their lives by someone they consider a hypocrite. "There's no element of hypocrisy." He suddenly smiles at me, benign again, and we end it there.

The Deptford Sector police are organising a memorial event for Hannah Baneth (see her obituary here) on Wednesday evening at the Civic Centre.

I recently found a Guardian article from 2001 about Hannah which I managed to miss. "Hannah Baneth's story is sadly typical of the kind of treatment meted out to many council tenants by paternalistic town hall pen-pushers over the past 30 years. A long-standing tenant activist, Ms Baneth had tried to get involved in helping her fellow tenants by attending meetings to improve the service they received." MORE....

lewisham news:Pics of the newly revamped Venue in New Cross. If only they'd revamp their music policy too. (Fond memories of seeing Gary Clail, Little Annie and African Headcharge there. Now it's all Oasis cover bands playing to drunken Kentish suburbanites. Not that I have any thing against drunken Kentish suburbanites as such, but...) And a little thing on Charlie Richardson from The Scotsman.

Knowhere: Lewisham Local Heroes, Famous ResidentsNot a blog, but reader-written: celebrities (sort of) who hail from round here, including Kate Bush (or not -I think it's true. She certainly played here, e.g. in the Rose of Lee, in her early years), Matthew Kelly, Gabrielle, Mica Paris, Tim Roth, Spike Milligan, Linda Barker and Timothy Spall (all Brockley/Honor Oak), Francis Rossi of the Quo (Catford I think), left-wing children's writer Edith Nesbit and right-wing children's writer Henry Williamson (they were going to name the Brockley Barge after Tarka the Otter, until someone told Weatherspoon's he was a fascist), Eleanor Marx (is that true?).

Some other gems: Spike Milligan said "I'd like to go to heaven, but if Jerrfey Archer is there I'd rather stay in Lewisham". "Louise (that singer from Eternal, now more famous for getting her jugs out for FHM) was born in [Lewisham] Hospital." "Former Labour Home Secretary Herbert Morrison (grandfather of Peter Mandelson) was MP for Lewisham East after the war. Sidney Webb (founder of the Fabian Society and Labour's First Trade Secretary) was the member for Deptford on the London County Council in the early 20th century."

My addition: Raji James aka Ash Ferreira in Eastenders gets his hair cut at George's in Crofton Park. Gabrielle used to get food from the Dutch Pot just along from George's, but that's closed now, to make way for another bloody Chinese.

Monday, November 14, 2005

• "The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."

• "No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny."

• "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil."

• "The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together."

• "Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence."

• "When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of "happiness" has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions."

Thursday, November 10, 2005

"I was in Dharamsala, India in late August when I heard that a major hurricane was approaching New Orleans. I was there with the Louisiana Himalayan Association (a group I belong to that works with Tibetan refugees), teaching English and making plans for future programs there for my students in New Orleans. Ironically, I soon found out that I was to leave the Tibetan refugee community to return to what had itself become a city of refugees. When I arrived home I found a city of empty streets, fallen trees, debris scattered everywhere, abandoned cars, flood-ravaged houses, and eerie silence. Since then I’ve been working with the cleanup effort in my neighborhood and with several grassroots organizations around the city. Over the past month the city has slowly begun to come back, as symbolized by the “second line” jazz funeral parade that marched through the city Sunday—the first time this has happened since the hurricane.

The following reflections are a bit in the spirit of a jazz funeral—they mourn our collective tragedy but speak out also for our collective hope."

"Personally, as a Palestinian who has worked in positions of responsibility for the last 31 years, including five years spent as a political prisoner, it is very difficult for me to continue as if nothing has happened when hearing a president of an Islamic state returning to the slogans of the 1960s and 1970s calling for the elimination of Israel. At that time, these were the slogans of the Arab nationalist movements (and also the Palestinian armed Marxist organizations). Today, these slogans have become Islamist political propaganda resurrected by the Iranians and different political movements that use Islam as their announced ideology.

The dangers of such slogans lie not only in their role in incitement, but also in the fact that they express a lack of strategic vision about the following issue, which also relates to post-disengagement issues in Palestine, namely: How do we deal with the 'Jewish question' in the Israeli-Palestinian and also in the Israeli-Arab and Islamic contexts?" MORE...

Jogo says:

I think you will want to blog this ..... and you might want to forward it to friends -- and whatever else you can to do to bring it to a wide audience. It's a glimpse into a struggling progressive and humane Arab/Mid-East mentality that is invisible (and not welcome) to the Israel-hating, LRB/Guardian-reading, pro-terror, Zarqawi-appeasing, morally adrift, sick-dreams Left (and also to the MSM that Joe Shithead reads).

And when I write "progressive," I do not mean the word as it has been perverted by the Left. I mean *actually* progressive -- what that word means in English, having to do with progress, or progressing down a path. Or progress in terms of moral evolution.

Friday, November 04, 2005

Nearly as irritating as Madeleine Bunting is fellow grauniad Jonathan Steele. Check out this for liberal logic: Iraq's "constitution will be declared to have passed, because the Bush administration wants it passed. It paves the way for elections in December, which will be spun as further proof of Iraq's gradual democratisation." So, Steele is saying that elections are not a good indicator of democratisation. Presumably, more Ba'athist gulags would be what Steele would need to see before agreeing that Iraq was actually becoming more democratic.

In the same article, by the way, he uses the word "resistance" to talk about the Islamo-Ba'athist insurgency, which, as Ihave repeatedly argued on this blog, is a good indicator of morally bankrupt anti-democratic thinking.

I have to confess I share the left's pleasure at the whole Scotter Libby/Dick Cheney/Karl Rove affair, laying bare the cronyism and dishonesty in the Bush inner circle. It is a bit reminiscent of the final years of Tory misrule on this side of the Atlantic, the Major years, from which New Labour surfed to power on the waves of Conservative sleaze. But while the British left in the mid-1990s were busy putting together some sort of credible alternative (not one to my liking admittedly), the American left seems to have nothing better to do than wallow ecstatically in the misery of the Republicans.

[T]he investigation has given us one of the clearest indications to date of how we got to this point. Given the malevolent partisanship of the Republican party it is not surprising that many liberals gloat at the prospect of a full-scale Republican implosion. But such schadenfreude is premature. The wounds of recent weeks have all been self-inflicted - the result of a mixture of hubris, malice, greed and ineptitude. There is no doubt that they have damaged Bush politically...But the Democrats are not faring much better, with only marginally more support than Republicans, according to a poll taken before the indictments and Miers withdrawal, but after hurricane Katrina and DeLay's arrest... Either unable or unwilling to present a clear agenda of how they would do things differently, they have been effectively mute for several months. With no opposition, popular disenchantment with the Bush Administration's ethical failings is descending into cynicism.

This is related to the point Todd Gitlin made in the summer, in an article I blogged then. Gitlin made the analogy with the the late 1960s, as the American public turned against the Vietnam war, much as many are now turning against the Iraq war: "As the war became less popular, so did the anti-war movement. It was hated, in fact—by the end of the decade, the most hated entity in America."

Youth Against Fascism: This is a blog by a young Canadian of the Harryish political tendency. From the first post:

When I was in Grade 12 (that is, 2002-2003), my politics were almost purely negative: anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-capitalist, anti-globalization etc. I would have called myself a socialist, but my actual understanding of the word was limited. In the course of rethinking my position on Iraq, I have been led into rethinking my positions on almost everything, and drawing new conclusions. In order to reach better conclusions, I have tried to become more informed, and I have in many cases returned to the so-called "classic" texts of Marxism.

Rua da Judiaria: I might have mentioned this blog before, a Portuguese langauge Jewish blog. I don't actually speak Portuguese, but I can read enough to know this would have good content if I could understand it, so I'm pleased to be linked to by them.

I've added the blogger.com "links to this post" thingy to the site. I might take it off again, depending if it just becomes embarassing in showing how few people link here.

I've finally decided to add word verification for comments. I got sick and tired of all the IPod, investment, viagra, scientology, etc sites using the comments for advertising. Sorry to those who have to put in the extra effort to leave a comment; hope it doesn't discourage anyone.

This is a brief comment at a slight tangent to the riots in Paris. Many Americans of the 'muscular' disposition, think that France and its government are aiders and abettors of political Islam, because Chirac is putatively anti-war and most French people are anti-American. In fact, Sarkozy/Chirac France is far more repressive than Patriot Act America, with very aggressive policies towards Muslim youth, far more draconian anti-terrorism legislation than Blair would dream of introducing, and as much racial segregation as pre-Katrina Louisiana. This is the context for the riots.

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Oddly, there doesn't seem to be much blog comment on the riots, certainly not in my corner of the blogosphere. Two exceptions are Big Lizards (which I reached via Myopic Thoughts) - see Is Paris Burning? and and Arms for the Poor - and No Pasaran.

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Jogo would disagree with my comment the context of the riots, as he would no doubt see this as leftist "root cause" thinking, on which he says:

Who can blame "the youths?" What else can they DO? Forces are operating upon them.

Yup, it's obvious to me there is no choice these people have but to riot.

I get a laugh out of the Root Cause people. You know why?

Because when they're tallying up the root causes, the causes are always THEMSELVES. Root causes never inhere in those other people, the Left's Fanonian suffering saints.

As I have said before in this ...uh, forum: in Leftist vision the white man has Motives and Agency, whereas the dark man is tossed about by Forces. If that's not racist condescension, tell me what is racist condescension.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

New at Engage: "Steve Cohen's little pale-blue book on left wing antisemitism caused a rumpus in the colleges when it first came out. Helped by the arresting title, which still raises a smile, That's Funny You Don't Look Anti-Semitic appeared in the coffee bars, Labour Clubs and Jewish Societies during the Miners Strike of 1984-85. Back then there were lots of Jewish lefties and the campus battles between Jewish students and the operational antisemites were starting to hot up again..."